Elena (33 page)

For the next month I worked on whatever book Sam assigned me. It was generally agreed that I would not be asked to do any editorial work on anything written, now or in the future, by Elena Franklin.

Accordingly, when the first few pages of Elena's new novel arrived at Parnassus, they went directly to Miriam's desk. She read the pages immediately, her eyes fastened on the manuscript as if it were a holy text. Then for a long time she was silent. Finally, unable to bear the suspense, I marched up to her desk.

“That manuscript you were reading,” I said, “it was from Elena, right?”

Miriam looked up at me. “Yes.”

“Well, is it any good?”

Miriam hesitated. “It's different.”

“What does that mean, ‘different'?”

“Different from her usual work.”

“May I see it?”

“I thought you and Sam had agreed that you'd keep away from Elena's work.”

“I don't want to edit it, Miriam, I just want to read it. Surely I have that right.”

Miriam considered this for a moment, then she handed me the manuscript. It was no more than twenty pages long. “It's what she proposes as the opening chapter,” she said.

I nodded. “Thanks. Do you want to know my opinion of it, once I've read it?”

“Not really, William,” she said.

I took the manuscript back to my desk and began reading the introductory chapter of
The Forty-eight Stars.

I was, to say the least, astonished by what I found. Structurally, it was pure chaos, a maelstrom of randomly selected images: disgorged eyes falling down blackened mine shafts; fingers digging beneath prison walls; trees tumbling through space with nooses swinging from their limbs. It was as if Elena had taken the most hideous scenes from her letters, cut them out, and thrown them into the air. The writing seemed to have been blown out of a blast furnace, wild and overheated.

After about five pages, however, this lurid whirlwind began to slow. A parade of caskets passes by, each draped with a flag — red and blue stripes with a single white star — the slow-motion funeral march to the grave of America. Somewhere in the distance a bugle is heard, and suddenly the caskets pop open and a series of American types haul themselves out of their coffins. There is the soldier, the sturdy yeoman, the teacher, the businessman, the politician, the liberal reformer, the cowboy … the list is long. It is also exact: there are forty-eight types. These ghostly personages proceed to engage in a good old American hoe-down, dancing and prancing and grouping themselves in various combinations probably meant to convey natural alliances, the farmer with the urban worker, for example, the politician with the rich industrialist. As time passes, the dance becomes more frantic, the spinning and whirling more desperate, until we are once again in the maelstrom with which the book began. And it is there, spinning madly, that Elena leaves us on page twenty: America as a wildly whirling top.

When I had finished reading it, I took the manuscript back to Miriam and dropped it softly on her desk. I lingered, waiting for her to ask me what I thought. She never did.

For the next few weeks, scattered sections of
The Forty-eight Stars
drifted into the office. Miriam always read them first, while I waited in the adjoining office, staring intently at her, trying, always in vain, to determine what she thought about this book, which seemed to me, as I read one section after another, increasingly strident and disordered.

Finally, after what appeared to be approximately half the novel had come to us, I asked Miriam bluntly what she intended to do about it. She told me that she intended to do nothing at all until Elena returned home.

Elena came back to New York in February of 1936. I was walking along the sidewalk toward my apartment when they pulled up in that same old battered Model A, Elena on the passenger side, Jack, smiling brightly, at the wheel. She bounded out of the car the instant Jack brought it up to the curb, and I swept her into my arms, relishing the feeling of having my sister back.

“I missed you very much.”

“Oh, William,” Elena said excitedly, “it was a wonderful trip. I've never learned so much in my life.”

“Good,” I said, carefully avoiding any mention of her book. “I'm glad it was a good experience for you.”

Jack sauntered up and shook my hand. “Well, Bill, why don't you ask us up for a drink? We're what they call road tired.”

“Of course. Please, come on up.”

In my apartment, I made coffee for the three of us, spiking Jack's with a touch of whiskey.

“I'm sorry I wasn't here for the party, William,” Elena said.

“What party?”

“For your book.”

“Oh, that was nothing. Just a little get-together at Miriam's. Even Sam didn't make it. Just mostly some of the people from the Project.”

“How is the Project?” Jack asked.

“Interesting,” I said. “But I prefer working at Parnassus.”

“I guess you know I've been sending in parts of my new novel,” Elena said.

“Yes, Miriam told me.”

Elena smiled brightly. “Have you read it?”

I shook my head. “No. Miriam likes to keep things like that to herself.”

“Do you have any idea what she thinks about it?”

“No, I don't, Elena,” I said, which in a way, at least, was true.

Jack slapped his leg. “Wait until you read it, Bill. It's amazingly imaginative. Not that old Socialist realism stuff at all. It's like a painting by Hieronymous Bosch, a word painting, you might say.” He took a quick sip from his cup. “Oh, and by the way, congratulations.”

“For what?”

“Engagement to Miriam,” Jack said. “You're a lucky man.”

“I think so,” I said. I turned to Elena. “So, now you're back for a while?”

“Yes,” Elena said. “More or less indefinitely.”

“Not me, though,” Jack said. “I've got a piece to write for New
Masses
, then I'm going down South. Got a hell of a lot going on down there.”

I looked at Elena. “You're not going with him?”

Jack shook his head. “No, she needs to finish the book. That's the most important thing. And you can't write the Great American Novel from the back of a Model A.”

“No,” I said quietly, “I suppose not.”

“I guess you've been following the events in Spain?” Jack asked.

“I read the papers,” I said, “that's about all. There's a lot of talk about it around the city.”

“Really?” Jack seemed surprised. “Who's talking, the liberals?”

“Communists, mostly,” I told him. “A lot of my old colleagues at the Project.”

Jack nodded. Then, without being asked, he launched into a lengthy discussion of the issues involved, predicting the civil war that would break out only a few months later. When he had finished, the conversation turned to subjects closer to home. Elena mentioned that she had managed to keep in touch with Elizabeth while on the road and that all seemed well with her in France. She had also gotten several letters from our father, mostly having to do with his itinerary.

All of this clearly bored Jack to death. He fiddled impatiently with the little doily on his chair or allowed his hands to flop about randomly, never suspecting that this might prove a distraction to anyone but himself.

Finally the conversation wound its way back to Parnassus Press and the fate of my Cowper book. Elena was sorry to hear about the poor sales but argued that the book was not yet dead.

“Oh, yes it is,” I said. “As a doornail.”

“I think the trouble may be Cowper himself,” Jack said, unsuccessfully concealing a yawn. “He's not modern enough to attract attention.”

“He attracted William's,” Elena said, defending me.

Jack laughed. “Well, you must admit that William is a special case.”

I smiled. “Jack's right. Cowper
is
slow going, even for the most plodding scholar. I've been thinking about another book though, about Coleridge.”

“That's better,” Jack said. He stood up, stretched, walked to the window, and stared out idly.

“I've been thinking about a full-scale biography,” I told Elena.

“Yes, William, that might be —”

“Used to be a soup kitchen down on the corner,” Jack said, still gazing out the window. He turned to me. “Did that dry up?”

“It moved over to Twenty-third Street,” I told him. “Every Thursday.”

Jack nodded dully, then turned back toward the window.

“Anyway,” I said to Elena, “the Coleridge book would have more natural interest if only because Coleridge is so much more famous than our dear friend Mr. Cowper.”

Jack abruptly left the window and took a seat across from me. “Coleridge sounds fine to me, Bill.” He glanced back at the window, drowsily watching as the curtains drifted back together, leaving only a slant of light on the living room floor. “I'm working on a migrant-labor piece.” Jack smiled at me knowingly. “I guess that sounds terribly topical to you.”

“The world is wide, Jack,” I said. “There's room in it for both my Coleridge and your migrants.”

“Certainly is, Bill.” Jack looked at Elena. “And by God, there's sure going to be room for Elena's book.”

“I'm sure there will be,” I said. But I concealed my steadily growing fear that my sister would prove to be only a flash in the literary pan, the sort about whom she herself later wrote in a passage on Delmore Schwartz in
Quality
, mourning “that early incandescence which precedes nothing but the slow and steady dying of the light.”

J
ack left for the South only a few weeks after he and Elena returned to New York.
New Masses
was interested in knowing the latest on the class struggle in rural America and dispatched Jack to the most intransigently reactionary region of the country. Even Jack failed to romanticize it in the reports he later wrote, essays as austere as James Agee's
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
would later prove grandiloquent. But in Jack, as Elena once said, Twain was always at war with Howells. It was a contradiction that even found its way into his dress, and I remember thinking, as Elena and I said good-by to him at the bus station the afternoon he left for North Carolina, that Jack's floppy hat was all gallant vagabond, while the leather briefcase he carried and the carefully arranged notes spoke of a perfectly ordered bourgeois professionalism.

“Take care of yourself, Jack,” I said, offering my hand.

Jack slapped it away and embraced me instead. “You'll never change, Bill,” he said. “Don't you know that I don't shake hands with friends?”

Elena smiled as she watched us. In a letter to Elizabeth, which Martha published, she wrote that “William sometimes seems to think that an embrace impinges upon his rectitude.”

If this was true of me at that time, it certainly was not true of Elena. She almost dove into Jack's arms as the bus drew up beside the ramp. They held each other for a long time, Elena clinging to him with a desperate physical urgency.

“I'll miss you, Elena,” Jack said as he drew himself from her arms.

He turned to me and held out a stack of papers he had been carrying. It was loosely bundled in brown paper and ragged twine. “Sam said I should give you this. My novel, for what it's worth. You're to be my editor.”

I glanced down at the bundle. “I see.”

“Sort of puts you on the spot, I guess,” Jack said. He placed his large hand on my shoulder. “But remember this, William, whatever you think about the book, I won't hold it against you.”

“I'll do the best I can on it, Jack.”

“Good,” Jack said. Then he turned and pulled Elena into his arms again.

“Take care of yourself,” he said. “And don't run off with any sweet-talking medicine man. I've hired a private eye to keep tabs on you, so you'd better keep straight with me.”

Elena smiled weakly.

Jack bent forward and kissed her. Then he disappeared into the bus, purposefully sitting on the side away from us so that Elena could not see him.

Elena and I lingered for a time after the bus had pulled away. Elena was preoccupied with Jack's departure, no doubt meditating upon all the particular joys that had departed with him. Finally we made our way slowly down Thirty-fourth Street.

I lifted the bundle of papers. “Have you read this?”

“No,” Elena said. “Jack prefers to keep his work to himself before it's finished, then he likes an editor's opinion before any other.”

I shook my head. “I'm not sure I'll be a very good editor for Jack. I'm not very political.”

“You're worse than that, William,” Elena said, “you're a little smug about politics in general.”

This assessment was not news. “Maybe I am,” I said casually.

“But does it ever bother you, this business of not being really committed to anything?”

“I'm committed to a great many things, Elena,” I said. “I'm committed to you and to Miriam. I'm committed to Jack, I suppose, at least as far as doing a good job on his book is concerned.”

“But do you think you can be fair to a book like his?” Elena asked. “Do you think you can judge it properly?”

“Yes, I do,” I said. Elena's questions were beginning to annoy me, simply because they hinted at something else, something that did not concern Jack, or even politics.

Finally it came out. Elena stopped and turned toward me. “You've read
The Forty-eight Stars
, haven't you?”

“No,” I said immediately.

Elena stared at me steadily.

“Don't lie to me, William,” she said. “Don't do it to protect me. And, by the way, don't do it to protect yourself.”

Once again I denied knowing anything about
The Forty-eight Stars.
I even added a little laugh for effect. “What makes you think I've read it?”